Unused content (SSB)
The following are beta elements that appeared in Super Smash Bros..
Dragon King: The Fighting Game
Super Smash Bros. was initially developed by Masahiro Sakurai and Satoru Iwata in their downtime, in a form titled Dragon King: The Fighting Game (格闘ゲーム竜王, Kakuto-Gēmu Ryūō), which lacked Nintendo characters. Sakurai, however, felt that the game could not provide the proper atmosphere on a home console without Nintendo characters, and they were soon added and the game was redesigned and renamed. Only five known images of Dragon King exist; no known video footage or working prototypes are known to exist.[1]
Below are the only known images of the game.
Planned characters
Bowser (the character who was most wanted in Smash 64, and was later playable in all future Smash games), according to an interview with Miyamoto, he was cut shortly late into development. Mewtwo (who is playable in Melee and playable in SSB4 as DLC), and King Dedede (playable in Brawl and in SSB4) were originally planned to be playable, but were scrapped due to a lack of development time.
Beta gameplay elements
A talk between Masahiro Sakurai and Satoru Iwata states that Sakurai had intended to add Final Smashes in the game. While he did record some dialogue for them, limitations of the Nintendo 64 prevented their inclusion; Final Smashes later became a reality nine years later with the release of Brawl. [2] While the sound effects of these Final Smashes are not accessible through normal play, they can be found through the use of the Debug Menu. These sounds include Ness yelling, "PK Starstorm!", Pikachu charging energy, and Captain Falcon yelling "Come on!". Other characters heard include Kirby and Link. In addition to the unused Final Smash clips, there are five unused Announcer voice clips: "Are you ready?", "Final Stage", etc. [3]
Beta stages
In the final game, two early stages, referred to as Small and New in the debug menu, are only playable with a GameShark; their intended use is unknown, but because they share textures and a background with Dream Land it has been assumed that the two were meant to be other Kirby stages, or were testing stages before Dream Land's design was finalized. Another odd note about these stages is that both of them contain invisible walls. In Dream Land Beta 1, it is also possible to go through the stage, as similar to Congo Jungle. This also causes some glitched movement however.
Saffron City and Dream Land also had minor differences with the final product; the roofs of buildings in Saffron City had a considerably brighter pink texture on the insides of them, while Dream Land had considerably darker shades of green, as well as much taller grass in the foreground and background.
New
Small
An older version of Dream Land. Note the darker coloration of the grass and trees.
An older version of Saffron City, with considerably more pink and purple.
Other beta elements
In the character select, the question mark boxes where the unlockable characters Captain Falcon, Ness, Luigi and Jigglypuff have their character portraits were initially supposed to be colored instead of the ordinary grey silhouettes with fiery backgrounds that appear in the final game; these coloured boxes matched the player number colours of red, blue, yellow, and green. Also, it seems the series symbol for the Yoshi series was originally not supposed to have spots on the egg.
The original character select screen.
